Lovely is the dark blue sky is extracted from Nordic Christmas, a collection of carols commissioned by VocalEssence in honor of Sons of Norway as it celebrates 125 years as a financial services and international cultural organization.The composer writes:"My approach to arranging this carol, as well as the other carols in Nordic Christmas, was to look at the text (originally in Danish by Nikolai Grundtvig, 1783-1872) and its background to see if there are new meanings hidden in the material. Perhaps there are circumstances around its creation or messages the original authors were trying to say that somehow get lost in the way they are interpreted today. Lovely is the dark blue sky is usually performed as a lustrous up-tempo carol, but thinking of Grundtvig's story and life, writing this text between episodes of severe mental illness, and his vision of a child looking at the dark blue sky at night, I made the atmosphere of this arrangement more dreamy, still and full of wonder. I still wanted to keep it childlike, with the choir singing tenderly and the soprano solo is ideally sung by a child."- Kim André Arnesen -Instrumentation:soprano solo, choir (SSAA) a cappella, piano ad libitum